Gallery, video editor and other photo apps
The gallery on the S4 zoom is the standard TouchWiz Gallery, which is
very capable. It has several view modes - Albums (the basic one), but
also Time, Locations, People and Favorites, which help you sort through
your photos.
The size of the thumbnails can be adjusted with a pinch zoom or with
the lens ring. The lens ring can also be used to zoom in on photos.
You can swipe right to reveal a pane with all the folders, which
helps navigate multiple folders with photos (you can pick multiple
photos from multiple folders at once). One option advanced photographers
will appreciate is the picture details popup, which shows things like
focal length, ISO, aperture, shutter speed and so on.
Standard TouchWiz gallery • changing thumbnail size
Gallery will automatically pull photos from your Picasa account (now folded into Google+).
The app also offers two ways to annotate your photos. One turns the
photo into a virtual Polaroid and lets you write a note on the empty
space. The other is non-destructive and saves the scribbled label away
from the photo, but those are harder to share.
Writing a note on a photo
Story Album can be really helpful in organizing your photos. After a
shooting session it will prompt you to group all the new photos into an
album. Albums can be created based on location, the people in the photo
and when the shot was taken.
Story Album takes the hassle out of organizing your photos
The Samsung Galaxy S4 zoom also includes Photo Suggest, which gives
you a peek at the most popular locations and sights people have
photographed either near you or in places you plan on visiting. This way
you can plan ahead what to see and photograph.
Photo Suggest shows what's worth photographing nearby
The Gallery app offers a fairly capable image editor. It covers the
basic operations like crop and rotate, adjust image properties (from
Auto adjust to manual exposure tweaking), add color effects and frames.
The Gallery offers basic editing options
A more creative app is the Paper Artist - it applies an effect to the
photo and lets you paint only a section of the image to highlight a
specific objects. You can also draw freehand and add frames.
Paper Artist is for the creative types
Editing videos is also enabled and it's a very simple process. You
pick a theme (you get only one preinstalled, the rest you can download
for free), which puts in a few stock clips for titles and lets you plug
in your own videos and photos.
The Galaxy S4 zoom can also edit your movies
File manager
The My Files app hasn't changed really - it is an efficient and
simple to use file manager. It can move, copy, lock and rename files in
bulk, even send multiple files to another phone. My files will only
browse the memory card and the large internal storage (it can't access
the system drive).
File manager
One of the best music players on a camera
The TouchWiz music player on the Galaxy S4 zoom is jam-packed with
features and supports a wide variety of file formats, including FLAC (16
bit, not 24 bit), Wave, etc.
Music is sorted by the usual Artist, Album, Playlist, etc. but
there's also Folder support, which is quite handy as it saves you the
need to sort songs into playlists like on so many other players. There
are more tabs available - you can hide or show tabs from the Settings
menu.
Samsung Music player • nearby devices
Then there's Music square - it's quite similar to the SensMe feature
of Sony smartphones. It automatically rates a song as exciting or calm,
passionate or joyful and plots those songs on a square (hence the name).
Mood options
The Samsung Galaxy S4 zoom can also search for content on third party players like PCs on the same network.
Samsung has enabled equalizer presets (including a custom one with 7
bands) along with the sound-enhancing SoundAlive technology, which
features 7.1 channel virtualization. Samsung uses SoundAlive in some of
their MP3 and Android-powered media players. There's also Smart Volume,
which equalizes the volume between tracks.
SoundAlive equalizer
The Now playing screen gives you the usual options - a timescroll of
the song, play/pause and back/forth controls, repeat and shuffle, volume
control but it also adds lyrics support, AllShare shortcut and a direct
sound settings shortcut.
Now playing
While listening to a song you can find music controls in the
notification area and the lockscreen. Voice commands can be used to
control the player too.
Music player options • controls in the notification area and lockscreen
Awesome video player
The best video player found on smartphones just got better. The new
video player, found on the Samsung Galaxy S4 zoom has the last watched
video on top for quick access. Under it there are three tabs - personal
(showing you the videos on your local storage), Download (which lets
into the Videos store) and Nearby devices, which shows the PCs and
players on your local Wi-Fi network.
The grid view is our favorite as it is a true quad-core tour de force
- the visible video thumbnails are actually playing the videos instead
of being static images. They play at a reduced framerate and generating
those previews takes a couple of minutes the first time around, but it's
an awesome preview and it shows what can be done when you have
processing power to spare.
Video player
The video player lets you choose between three crop modes for how the
video fits the screen. The same SoundAlive audio-enhancing technology
is available here too. The video player lets you squeeze the best
viewing experience out of the large, high-res screen. You can adjust
video brightness, color tone and enable outdoor visibility too.
The chapter preview detects chapters in the video and shows a
rectangular grid, with live thumbnails (just like the grid view above).
Pop up play is here too - it moves the video in a small floating
window and you can use other apps on the phone while still watching the
video. You can use pinch zoom to adjust the size of the video.
Pop up play
The Samsung Galaxy S4 zoom offered a list of subtitles and let us
pick. It scans for all subtitles, so the file doesn't have to have the
same name as the video file.
Subtitles support
The Galaxy S4 zoom managed to play all files we threw at it. DivX and
XviD along with MP4, AVI and MKV were no problem for the Galaxy S4
Active, though DTS and AC3 audio failed play.
Nicely smooth audio output
Despite the different chipset, the Samsung Galaxy S4 zoom didn't
disappoint and matched the perfectly clean audio output of the rest of
the Galaxy S4 family.
The Samsung Galaxy S4 zoom had absolutely flawless output when
connected to an active external amplifier, producing excellent scores
all over the field. Its volume levels aren't the highest we have seen,
but it should just fine for most users.
Impressively enough, there's next to no degradation when you plug
in a pair of headphones. Save for the barely detectable (in the lab,
let alone with a naked ear) hike in stereo crosstalk the output remains
perfect. A really solid showing by the hybrid device here.